The Ishim Underground

by Carrie Bailey

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  After a short series of abrupt turns and following a long narrowing corridor of glowing greenish rock to the left and then again left and left again, they stood facing a metal cage on the edge of a cliff. Behind it, the passage into the den opened before them and it was dazzling. It was a city. An underground city carved from the rock. Or at least that’s what the faint outlines far in the distance in the open cavern appeared to be. It wasn’t all really too clear yet.

  The cage was the size and shape to fit four men, suspended within another cage, both shaped from metal. The glow dust had been wiped clear from the inner cage, but residue still collected on the top of the outer bars. It was fastened against the overhang and suspended from a dust covered high above that seemed to be fitted into the rock between the stalactites.

  Amit boarded first pulled a lever on the base of the cage. The gears jolted into motion while the surrounding chains moved up and down around the fragile box.

  Clank! Ker-Clank!

  Just as impulsively as he had started the contraption, Amit shoved the lever back, stopping it. The cage halted a foot lower than it had been. Eron pushed the metal accordion gate open and lowered himself into the box. He noticed immediately that floor was wooden. It didn’t clank. It creaked.

  “Start it again,” said Eron.

  Amit pulled the lever again and they were going down. What Eron saw through the bars of the cage as it slowly lowered was, in his estimation, the most magnificent feat of architecture imaginable in the Liamic Era. Each doorway, every path, stair, fence, pole and bench had been carved from the rocky interior of the cave and what was removed was placed elsewhere to build up the ghostly underground city. The edges were smooth. The walls finely chiseled. There were handprints here and there on the surfaces of every walkway they passed going down. Some were older and lighter. Others were dark and obviously fresh.

  Eron counted eleven stops, eleven floors in all before the ill-fitted mechanics of the device gave a final jolt. They were at the bottom.

  “It’s an escalator,” he said carefully drawing the opposite gate of the contraption shut. It opened on all sides. Where they entered from the top of the cliff, two side exits for each walkway that led away along the cliffside and the opposite gate that opened outward on ground level facing some buildings in the distance.

  Remarkable. If Eron had had a blank scroll, he would have wanted to sketch a picture of it. Though the top of the cavern wasn’t visible, paths and stairs wound all around the interior. There was even an enclosed spiraling walkway that circled eleven times to the top of the cliff that ran parallel to the elevator.

  “The Archive had seven levels before the ash storms,” whispered Eron to no one in particular.

  Ping. Ping. Ping.

  It seemed the Ishim was getting impatient as they should gawping at the den. Eron and Amit walked along the lower footpaths. They could see others rounding up along the cylindrical buildings, but Tunkukush kept them walking into the thick of the city, which was lined with posts that held bowls of the green dust.

  Thieves rested on benches. People were darker than everything around them, because there was little dust collecting on their person. But, as Eron’s eyes adjusted to the light, he could still see them as if it were the early hours of dusk. A man in a tricorn hat stepped under a lamppost and every hair on his beard shone brightly with reddish hairs and light skin. The lines of his face dug deep, but only few steps away from the lamppost and he was again an anonymous shifting dark mass.

  “There are so many,” breathed Eron. “How do they all know not to speak to us?”

  Ping.

  Left.

  Eron and Amit meandered around the periphery of the buildings trying to not stare anyone in the eye. It wasn’t really a city like Auck City, more like a modest sized village square, as there was in Dunedin, but with stairs to upper levels a regular village wouldn’t have. There was a creek and a stone bridge that crossed it. Benches. Drapes over the doors to people’s shops and homes. Carts. Food. Unusual sorts of foods Eron had never seen before although they could have been eels. He couldn’t tell. But, certainly fish. Lots of fish. In fact, everything smelled a little fishy around the buildings.

  They took a tunnel that led away from the nearly bustling center down some stairs descending and broadening until they opened along side the creek where the bitter cold air rushed in and the black waters gurgled. The sound of water pouring rapidly over the aquifer echoed. Eron pulled his fur around his shoulders. A raft tied to the bank waited, but as Eron grabbed for the rope, Tunkukush banged furiously.

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  “Perhaps we should swim?” Eron said, dripping with sarcasm. His legs ached. His head was spinning. He was so tired he could hardly stand.

  “Wade,” hissed the Ishim.

  Eron plunged his foot into the icy waters and felt the bottom barely higher than his knee. And just like that, he was awake again. He was starting to hate the Ishim. Walking against the current was slow. It pushed them backward, rushing around their shins.

  They trudged through the waters, burning cold and turning blue, until they found a miserable rocky ledge securely boarded. Eron yanked enough planks free for them to climb into the dry space, which was about the size of a Dunedin pillared building.

  He rested his head and slept immediately.

  The sound of the water roared calmly and smoothly beside him when he woke. His legs hurt. Amit had built a fire and was hanging the last of his bird meat to make jerky over a makeshift spit. Eron’s eyes hurt, too, though the breeze from the water whisked the smoke away from their damp enclosure. Eron scooted toward the flames and curled around the stones Amit had assembled to keep the fire contained. The green glow had faded before the warm firelight. It was so peaceful.

  Eron slept again. And he stirred again later to see Amit sleeping on his bindle and they slept some more. A day may have come and gone. But, when he woke up, his trousers were completely dry, if a little stiff. He didn’t open his eyes.

  “Ropes in the pub,” came the tiny voice inches from his ear.

  Eron listened without showing that he was awake.

  “Ropes,” repeated the spider.

  “Ropes,” mumbled Eron, suppressing his amusement.

  The Ishim was hanging from a web attached to the ceiling whispering its instructions into his ear.

  “You want the ropes from the pub,” said the Ishim.

  “I will obeeeeey,” said Eron, like a golem, elongating his vowels as the laugh buried just under the surface of his expression burst through.

  No matter what the Ishim had planned, the first thought Eron’s mind was that he was alive. There was ground beneath him. Fire beside him. Water. Food. Well, not much, but a little. All of his legs and arms were still attached to his body. Nothing was being burned to the ground. No arrows or pikes flying. No blood spills or screams. He wasn’t sick. Nothing was trying to eat him. This. This was bliss. The small part of him that missed his mother and needed something new to read couldn’t compete with the sheer joy he was experiencing just realizing that he had opened his eyes.

  No one could take that from him. Not even a plotting Ishim.

  “Tunkukush, leave me alone,” he laughed.

  “What did I say?” said the spider crawling up it’s thread away from Eron who turned his back from the meager coals still burning in the pit.

  “You were talking,” said Eron. “That’s bad enough.”

  “You must have been dreaming,” said the Ishim.

  “Wait. I’ve got an idea,” said Eron rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  “Does it involve ropes?” asked Amit with a smirk. “Because, I know where to get them.”

  “Let me think about this,” Eron said stretching. He yawned. “Are they in the pub? Let’s go get some rope.”

  “Simple!” said Amit rolling himself up into a sitting position.

  “Good idea,” said the spider.

  “No,” sai
d Eron pulling in another wide yawn and flailing his arms out. “Not yet. I’ve earned this. Only a bed could make this better.”

  When he got up, which was quite a while later, he felt new. Eron took a rock from the ground and began a tally on the rock face. Fourteen days had come and gone since he left Dunedin. Only forty more to wait until he spoke with Micah. The coating of dust on the walls scratched away easily and fell in clumps, which Eron formed into a ball the size of his thumb. From the rubble in the corners of the enclave and the density of the greenish powder, which he could barely see after Amit put another piece of drift wood on their tiny blaze, it was obvious no one had been there for ages. Even a thief on the run from the other thieves wouldn’t be foolish enough to stay there. One tremor and they would all be covered in boulders. The buildings and the tunnels above in the main chamber of the cavern were reinforced with beams. This roomy area was not.

  “We need eye patches,” said Amit.

  “What for?” asked Eron.

  “To keep one eye conditioned to the dark,” said Tunkukush.

  It made sense. If they wanted to keep a fire, they would still need to see in the cave without waiting hours for their vision to adjust.

  “I guess we can make some,” said Eron.

  With some leather from their furs and threads from the arms of Eron’s spare tunic, they fastened patches to tie around an eye.

  “What are you doing?” demanded the Ishim after Eron had finished.

  “I’m putting my things away,” said Eron. He had his bundle open and was chewing on some of Amit’s bird meat.

  The scrolls were in relatively good shape though they’d been rained on and the edges were soaked through. He had both of the tinctures thanks to Amit and the Ishim conspiring against him. He still wished he could have saved Eloise. Whatever the one vial contained, he had never seen anything like it before. Who knew? It might even bring back the dead. The fire horn and the bota had been invaluable. He looked their straps over for signs of wear.

  “Will you be doing that all day?” asked Tunkukush.

  “Does it matter?” asked Eron rhetorically.

  Although he slept on his gray cloak and the fur he took from the vendors, it was not something he ever wore. He was Auckian. Auckians wore robes. Cloaks were popular in the far western fields, but they made great bundles when used with a leather strap set. Eron had taken to rolling the vials and the lens in his loin clothes, which he then rolled inside the discourses, which went inside the cloak that he bound tightly with the straps. Eron typically wore both his yellow tunic and the navy tunic he got from the weaver’s son though when it was warm, he often rolled one of them tightly around the discourses before rolling them all inside the cloak. Aden’s knife went in the blade guard attached to his thick leather belt. He had only one pair of trousers, one pair of boots from the villagers and one set of knit stockings made by his mother.

  It was time to wash them again.

  “Eron,” said Tunkukush who had returned to the metal canister around Amit’s neck. “Is that necessary right now?”

  He had started to strip his clothes for a dunk in the aquifer.

  “Are all 500 year old men so impatient?” said Eron.

  “You have half a dry bird left,” said the tinny ringing voice from the metal canister.

  “And some pemican,” said Eron holding up a chunk the size of his fist.

  “You have to learn to steal,” said the spider.

  “Right now?” said Eron. “I think I’ve earned some time to rest.”

  “Yesterday, I agreed with that. Today, I don’t. You slept two days already,” said the spider. “That’s fifteen days you should have marked on your calendar. Not fourteen. And most of those days you didn’t eat.”

  “Amit and I can go many days without eating.” He waved at them both.

  “You already have,” said the spider. “Amit even longer.”

  Eron touched his sunken stomach.

  “You’re going to need your strength for this,” said Tunkukush.

  “Let me think about it,” said Eron. But, he didn’t mean it. The spider had a point.

  As instructed, the boys ventured back into the heart of the D.O.T. and found what looked like the pub. It was on the third level by the elevator and had recently been emptied. Mugs and wooden plates littered the table. The rock floor was coated with medicinal wine and other types of alcohol Eron had never smelled before.

  “Why can’t we just eat rats?” said Amit looking in through a chiseled opening in the outer wall of the pub, resting his arms on the wide bank. Rodent droppings had collected in the corner of the window and mixed with a buildup of the green dust.

  As far as Eron could tell, the thieves dusted their chambers regularly to keep the lighting low. The dust, once you adjusted to seeing it, shone with the brilliance of midday, if noon had been a typically peridot sort of hue. The thieves preserved the batches of dust they collected in containers of every construction and size. At the pub, they were set on the doorsteps. They would bring them in to light the room when it opened.

  Unlike the people above ground, thieves in the D.O.T. slept in a pattern of about four hours broken only by a drinking ruckus for three hours and then another four of sleep before they wandered from their stoney rooms to engage the day productively. The slovenly shenanigans halted dead in their tracks while the pub owner slept, but they started again as soon as he woke up.

  Two sleeps. Four hours each.

  Eron reckoned, after watching the coming and going of the inebriated thieves for a few days, that the storage room would be heavily guarded. But, it was easy enough to find. The pub workers had to fetch fresh barrels regularly down a long alley alongside the pub through the only wooden door in the den that was barred shut and bolted.

  “If we can get in, we could hide in the empty wine barrels during their first sleep, covering our scent with coffee grounds. We plug the lock and leave during their second sleep. We take the ropes and coffee. Nothing else,” said Eron.

  “Why do we need ropes?” asked Amit.

  “Tunkukush,” yelled Eron once they’d arrived wet up to the kneed and still hungry back at their forgotten chamber. “Why pray tell do we need the ropes?”

  “Tunkukush,” Eron repeated tapping the canister.

  Two smokey eyes popped through the holes on its side.

  “Must I cater to your every whim?” groaned the spider. “Do you know the story of the boy who cried wolf?”

  “I don’t know what a wolf is,” said Eron.

  “Like a loogaroo,” it replied, a bit gruffly. “It’s a clever parable with a profound moral that goes like this - there was once a spider who stopped coming out of his home, because a young man bothered him once too many.”

  “What’s a moral?” asked Amit.

  “Leave the spider alone or he won’t come out,” said the Ishim. “And I’d like to be put down for a while.”

  “That’s the moral of that story only,” corrected Eron. “A moral in general is- Well, it’s concerned with right and wrong.”

  “So, I’m not a moral,” said Amit, setting the metal canister on a boulder in the far corner of the cave.

  “You’re pretty good sometimes,” said Eron, subtly congratulating himself on his own wit.

  “I’m suprabadified!” Amit protested. “I’ll be a thief and I’ll never have to be good again. Until I’m a highwayman.”

  “That is not even English,” said Eron.

  “What is English?” asked Amit.

  “It’s what we speak.”

  “I don’t speak English,” said the boy.

  Eron sat down and started to massage his head. He was getting frustrated. He got up and went to the Ishim’s canister.

  “Tunkukush,” he said, tapping the tube with his grubby nail. “Didn’t Gil send you with us to help me?”

  The spiders eyes popped from the holes on his canister again and looked at Eron, “You’re hungry, aren’t you?” It said soft
ly. Almost compassionately.

  Eron nodded and felt his ribs sticking out.

  “Then, stop feeling your stomach and look for something to eat!” it yelled, seeping back into the canister. “And don’t forget the ropes. Now, leave me alone.”

  “Can’t you just disguise yourself as someone else?” Eron pleaded. “And what do ropes have to do with food? Why aren’t we trying to take some food?”

  “Come here. Closer to me. Both of you.” Amit and Eron leaned over the tube, but the spider didn’t come out. “Listen carefully, I lose mass every time I change shape, move, talk or even think,” it said, echoing from its little gray holder. “I could get the ropes for you, but I will disappear before I get back with them.”

  “Do you need coffee?” asked Eron thoughtfully.

  Coffee made their ancestors evolve into Ishim through a process called dedensification. That was what Achazya said. Ishim coffee. Not any sort of coffee. If you were young, it aged you. If you were old, it repaired you. If you were wounded, it healed you.

  “It won’t help,” came the grumbly echo.

  “Is that what is in my vial?” said Eron, suddenly struck with suspicious epiphany. He ran to his things, which were meticulously laid out on the ground beside the empty fire pit. “Where are they?”

  “I buried them,” said Amit.

  “Why in all the years since the alliance landed would you bury them?” said Eron exasperated.

  “Tunkukush said.”

  “And he made you hide them when Eloise was dying,” said Eron.

  Amit nodded.

  “It’s the Ishim coffee, isn’t it?” said Eron. He was only a handful of internal diatribes away from losing his mind. Ishim. Real. Ishim Coffee. Also real?

  “Yes,” said the spider. “But, it won’t help me. Just get some ropes.”

  “Come on,” said Eron. “Anyway, I need to use the toilet.”

  “Toilet?” asked Amit. He had probably never heard the word before.

  “A latrine.” Still no sign of recognition. “It’s a hole in the ground to relieve yourself and bury it where it doesn’t stink,” explained Eron.

  “Mine’s over there,” said boy, pointing to the other corner of the room.

  Amit followed Eron past a line of thieves still acting oblivious, still going about their business, muttering, gesturing, carrying things, bodies, plunder, and generally living the life of a scoundrel. They had come to regard the thieves like shadows, generally disregarding their presence, in the same way the thieves disregarded them.

  “How simple! That’s the latrine, isn’t it?” said the boy, pointing to a cluster of doors with crescent moons.

  Eron opened a stall door while Amit tried the adjacent booth. A whirring noise erupted beside Eron like the sound of a river crashing against a boat. Amit threw open the door.

  “You’re not even wet, are you?” said Eron. The latrines were positioned over the exposed part of the aquifer and emptied into them. During the few days they’d been in the cave, Eron had learned that the water was piped into the rooms from above. Ground level water carried away the waste. So, when they were walking home to their little enclave, they were effectively in the sewer. “They’ve even got some fine papers to rub on your nether regions,” he told Amit, feeling the texture of the material. “This is paper, but not as hard as the stuff they use at the Archive.”

  “I’m taking some for the fire,” said Amit shoving a stack into the pocket of his knickerbockers.

  He had never announced his intention to steal before.

  “You can never underestimate the importance of sanitation,” Eron lectured. “Sanitation is civilization. My mother would call this a wretched den of sin and despondency, but I think even she would appreciate these toilettes. Especially this paper.”

  “Desponden-what?” asked Amit.

  “I don’t know,” said Eron, exiting the stall. “Something bad. I guess I just needed to exercise my vocabulary before I lost it.” He shrugged. “Better than always going supra-this and anti-that.”

  Amit kicked the back of his heel. “You think I’m an idiot,” he spat pounding Eron on the temple.

  “No,” said Eron. He ducked and covered his head to avoid the boy’s wrath. Amit might blow off steam now and then and steal things, but Eron couldn’t imagine he’d actually hurt his blood brother. “Wait! Look up there!”

  “I’m not falling for that,” said Amit, though he did stop pounding on him.

  The latrines opened into an open parklike area. Nothing was growing, but there were benches around the open space. And there was a view of the elevator, the spiral stair and farther down along around the inside of the cavern where no rooms were carved into the interior wall, beside the end the fourth to eleventh floor, were words. The Municipal Code. It had been etched into the wall. And not in the nomadic symbols, but in English. Modern English.

  “Don’t steal everything?” Eron read aloud. “That’s not how I remember it.”

  “Simple,” said Amit with reverent admiration. “Thieves can read, too.”

  They also noticed beams across the third, sixth and ninth levels. It caught both the boys’ attention at the same time. They looked at each other knowingly. A pattern of wear on the third floor where the dust had been worn at different points along the beams revealed that someone had slung across them.

  “I could lower you straight down over there,” said Eron, pointing at the main walkway between the taller buildings. Right above the vendors.

  “Do you think anyone will try to kill me for taking this?” said Amit patting his pocket.

  “The paper?” said Eron. “No, latrine paper is usually free, though not as nice. But, that won’t matter considering everything else we’re going to need.”

  They crouched down behind a restaurant that had been chiseled from the ground in one round piece in the center of the open space. And plotted. Together, Eron and Amit hatched an infallible plan to get the ropes they needed from the pub. Eron was sure that the only way the pub owner could bring the wine barrels to the third level was by hoisting them up from the main road. And he figured that was how Tunkukush knew they had ropes in the store room. The spider must have noticed on the way in. So, once they had a few ropes, they could sling Amit over a beam, lower him to bottom level and pilfer the supply carts while they passed. It couldn’t be any simpler.

  “Simple, so, let’s get more paper,” suggested Amit.

  “Right,” said Eron.

  They went back to the latrines.

  Eron fed stack after stack of soft tissue to Amit through the air vents in the rear of the latrine where the boy waited to catch them. It might not have been the most obvious method for collecting all the paper, but it was better to have one person going in and out of the stalls and one walking away with all the paper. Amit tied the tissues to his chest under his tunic with a bit of string Eron found on a lamppost.

  Then, they waited in cold breezy latrines. Right before the first sleep of the evening, the pub owner went to the store room for a fresh barrel, leaving the solid wooden door ajar. Eron was ready. He crept up behind him and while standing in the doorway stuffed the lock with a wad of tissue.

  “Is the pub still open?” Eron asked him, making a lame excuse for being there before the man noticed him.

  The owner looked up, but said nothing when he saw who it was. The burly man had thick hairy arms and a long gray beard, which brushed against the barrel as he rolled it out of the door with his oversized palms. The man kicked the door shut behind him. And it stuck in a closed position, but only Eron could hear clearly that the latch mechanism had failed.

  “Why the coffee?” asked Amit when they were in the storeroom rubbing the grounds on their nearly thread bare tunics.

  “It covers the smell of anything. Even us,” said Eron, reaching for the lid to the empty barrel and pulling it over him. Inside the barrel, Eron removed his stockings, filled them with the coffee grounds he’d collected and tied them
to his belt.

  A revel of intoxicated singing pounded across the walkway beside the alley. And then it was silent. The second sleep had began. Like a ball player, Amit threw open the wooden door of the stall and together, they dragged a man-shaped mass of rope, which they had covered in tissue and Eron’s spare tunic and fur. It was the most pathetic ruse imaginable, but what thief would stop them. They slide the rope dummy to the river without being asked any questions, which was partly owning to the fact that everyone was either sleeping, drunk or indoors. No guards among thieves.

  “I, Eron of Auck City, the first scribe to outwit thieves in their own den!” cried Eron once they’d reached their chamber.

  “And I!,” started Amit. He stopped shouting and looked embarrassed.

  “Amit,” offered Eron.

  “Amit of, uh,” said Amit, concentrating.

  “Amit, wild boy of the waste!” said Eron quickly.

  “Never mind,” said the boy, slumping against the wall.

  “A natural thief like you doesn’t have to boast,” said Eron. The boy brightened.

  It was true.

  Thieving did not come as easily to Eron as it did for Amit whose genius and composure during the process was unparalleled. Eron didn’t think he was doing that bad. He just wasn’t that good. Every day after the two sleeps when the supply carts arrived, Eron lowered Amit from a beam and the spotted boy swiftly selected a few of life’s basic necessities from whatever was brought in. The beams were not easy to make out in the dark. And a boy with no dust on his body, hanging in the air, was even harder for the recently arrived thieves to see. Their carts were nothing more than the sort of wheelbarrows the Dunedin farmers used. But, Amit could pick anything from a pile with his toes. The boy knew timing. He knew when to let a cart pass. He knew how much he could take. All Eron had to do was hold the rope and pull him up if anyone approached the ledge on the level where he kept watch.

  At first, Amit kept their ambitions modest. An onion. The first day. They roasted it. The next day. Another onion. Also roasted. Some moa feathers for bedding. It was a matter of getting a bit of whatever came by. More onions. Some garlic. The days and the sleeps passed slowly with little to eat. It was easier for Amit who didn't need as much. At the cavern, they studied the sounds of letters and began stringing words together. It was amazing how fast the days could pass when there was little more to do than wait.

  But, a day came rather quickly when Amit looked over the wheelbarrow full of root vegetables and saw something he wanted much much more. Amit stole a freshly pressed tricorn hat with a fine golden feather from one of the lamassu.

  “You can’t wear that anywhere,” said Eron, as Amit set his new black hat on his greasy yellow head.

  Their bellies were hardly bursting. Churning. Gurgling. But, not bursting. Although Eron held the rope, Amit took what he liked. After a few more days, he had upgraded almost all his gear. But they hadn't eaten. It took a little coaxing from Tunkukush before Amit agreed to give Eron a chance on the rope so he could focus on the necessities. Like food.

  Supplying an underground village was not like supplying the Auck City market. Eron estimated that there were only 150 people in the den at any given time. There were no street vendors. No market. Just a few shops, a pub and the restaurant in the open space. Only a few wheelbarrows entered each day. Whatever came is what had to be eaten.

  It wasn’t as easy for Amit, being smaller, to lower Eron, but it was made easier adding extra rope and having Eron climb out onto a higher beam and sling it over before wrapping it again around the lower one.

  Once over the wheelbarrow, which had stopped beside the restaurant, Eron sorted through a heap of cherries. He was looking for something he liked more than cherries when he spied a crate full of books being loaded into a cart by a thief at the base of the elevator. It was nothing like the scrolls made by the Yellow Guard, but a text. A dingy text, bound on the side, with square bits of paper stacked one on top of the other. Real paper. Not the latrine tissue either. It was solid and undoubtedly coated in modern print. Eron was frothing at the mouth.

  He untied the loose end of the rope attached to his belt. Amit looked down at him from the overhead ledge. Eron held out his hands in the shape of a book and mouthed the word ‘book’ over and over until Amit quit shaking his head. Eron grabbed three books. Shaking with excitement, he retied the rope, and yanked it until the wild boy pulled the rope one arm length at a time until it snapped.

  Thud!

  Eron hit the ground.

  Before he could yell out, he felt a gag pulled between his teeth. His wrists were quickly bound by the stolen rope. Amit dashed toward the ground floor, but was easily taken by the men waiting for him. With hands bound and arms tightly secured to their torsos, also covered with the old fraying rope, they were marched downward and onward through a long tunnel on the sixth level of the underground city. They were led past a small army of highway men, who shoved the two novice thieves into an arched entrance that was marked with modern writing. They fell on their sides in an open room in the middle of a ring of solemn and shadowy figures, all of which hovered in the air a few inches from the ground.